French Lessons

The French lessons are a key element to the fulfilment of our philosophy.

We tailor the content for each individual school dependent on teacher requirements, age level and ability. The lesson time is used to reinforce learning of new vocabulary from the activities, excursions and every day life at MCF as well as encouraging pupils to develop in confidence and speak to their peers in a different language.

All the lessons are led by experienced bilingual French native speakers who have FLE and/or PGCE qualifications. We encourage our staff to bring their enthusiasm and personal experiences to the classroom, to make the lessons fun and interesting with a real ‘French’ flavour. To increase the impact of the lessons we keep class sizes to a minimum at all times and typically have no more than 10 children in a lesson group.  This allows for greater individual engagement and differentiation which naturally helps drive the quality of the lessons for the children. 

We specialise in preparing pupils for common entrance and scholarship papers as well as GCSE and A level intensive revision. Equally, we can provide a suitably tailored  programme for any year group and any level.

We usually allocate 1½ hours each day to French lessons, apart from the last day, when time is filled with visiting a local market. In general, we concentrate on teaching conversational French with a focus on vocabulary relevant to the activities, French life, Burgundian culture and local history. However, if there is anything specific you would like us to cover, a particular course you are working through or area or skill that needs to be studied, we are very happy to do so.

For A level and GCSE groups we are able to offer more lesson time as required. We also believe that there is no better way to build confidence and knowledge of the language than through its everyday use. As a result we can provide complete language immersion for advanced groups. As well as day to day conversation at the centre and on excursions being exclusively in French we can also organise visits and talks from local members of the Avallon and Magny community who are keen to speak about the local region and their real lives in France. This provides the opportunity for pupils to prepare and ask questions and directly become involved in debates and discussions.